What's next?

I don't know. I'm not sure what to do with this blog right now. I've been writing to old friends of mine and Charles-Henry's since Saturday to make sure they know of his passing. In this time that I'll call l'après CHM, I've been thinking a lot about how a series of coincidences, almost accidents, can alter the course of a person's existence. That's what happened to me 40 years ago.

In 1982, I had just left Paris after living and working there for three years. I lived with and then was married to a French woman back then. She really wanted to go live in the U.S. I didn't want to leave Paris, but at the age of 33 I was coming to the realization that I needed to fly across the Atlantic one more time, maybe the last, figure out where I would like to live, and then find a job with some kind of retirement plan in case I lived long enough to actually go into retirement one day. I had met Walt, and my wife and I separated and eventually divorced. She stayed in Washington DC and had a long career in the the translation department at the International Monetary fund (IMF). She still lives there and is retired.

One day in the autumn of 1982, a friend of mine from North Carolina who lived in DC (and still does), a woman named Eleanor who was a student at Duke when I was and who was also on the Vanderbilt University study abroad program in Aix-en-Provence with me in 1970, called me and said she had noticed an ad that the U.S. Information Agency (USIA, the cultural services of the U.S. Department of State) was running in the Washington Post with the goal of finding and hiring a full-time French-English translator. You should apply, Eleanor said. I had no idea whether I could qualify for such a job, but I sent in an application. I hadn't seriously started looking for a job yet, but time was passing. I was asked to come in and take a translation test soon after that.

My French was pretty good in 1982, because since 1970 I had spent 6 months in Aix, 9 months in Rouen (where I had become friends with a family in which nobody spoke English), 18 months in Paris (1974-76) on the staff of the University of Illinois (U of I) year abroad program, and then three more years in Paris (1979-82) commuting to Metz in Eastern France to teach English classes part-time at the university there, and finally serving as resident director of another American study abroad program that operated out of the Alliance Française.

When I wasn't living and working in France, I lived in Champaign-Urbana IL and worked as a graduate student and teaching assistant in the French Department at the University of Illinois, as well as a part-time employee of the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF), which had its headquarters in Champaign. There I had helped organize and worked on the staff at AATF conventions for teachers that we held on the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean in 1979 and in the city of Québec in francophone Canada in 1980.

After returning to the U.S. in 1982, I had almost decided to go and look for a job in Illinois, preferably Chicago, but I finally decided to try my luck in Washington DC first because I figured I had a better chance of finding a job there in which my French-language skills might be helpful and because it was much closer to my home town on the N.C. coast. That turned out to be a fateful decision.

This is a photo taken in San Francisco in 1998. From left to right, there's Walt (at age 38), our dearly departed friend Cheryl (age 47), me (age 49), and Charles-Henry (age 73). He died a few days ago at age 99. I think our friend Sue, Cheryl's first cousin, took the picture. Sue is still out there in California and I talk to her on the telephone a couple or three times a month. We were in San Francisco to see a collection of French impressionist paintings at the SF Museum of Modern Art.

At the beginning of January 1983 the phone rang at the apartment I had found to rent in Arlington VA. It was Charles-Henry calling. I didn't know him and he didn't know me. He told me he had been asked by a USIA colleague, a French woman named Jeanine, to evaluate my translation test (among others) and help her decide who was the best candidate for the translator job she needed to fill.

Over the phone, Charles-Henry said he thought I might be a good candidate for a job slot he needed to fill at USIA. Would I come in and talk to him? Of course I said yes. He worked in a building located at 1776 Pennsylvania Avenue, near the White House. I was impressed. More tomorrow...